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How to Configure Table View

The table view is the most common way to show a structured, scrollable list of items and a core competency for an iOS developer. When you see an iOS application showing a scrolling list of items, it is usually a Table View.

In our FirstApp, we have added separate labels and set their explicit values directly in the storyboard.

If we had wanted these to be all dynamic content that we could change from Swift by connecting each label as a separate outlet.

But it can be a tedious task if we had dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even an unpredictable amount of items.

The Table View is perhaps the classic, most fundamental iOS data-driven control, and you cannot avoid it.

We are talking about a data-driven control, but when you hear the word table, don't think databases and iOS table view has nothing to do with database tables.

Configuration

The idea of a table is defined by a certain number of rows and columns. In iOS, we don't have to worry about columns, because here a table view is only one column wide.

It is always one column with multiple rows.

Each row in the table view contains one cell, and the cell is just a container to hold the contents of that row.

The contents can be whatever you want, maybe that cell contains a single label or more and an image

Sections and Headings

You can break the rows into different sections if you need to make some kind of visual distinction between one set of rows and another set of rows.

The easiest way to understand this is just to look at the iOS Settings application, where you'll see groupings of rows with gray gaps between them.

The gray gaps distinguish sections in a table view, sometimes it is just a gap between the sections, but you can also provide headings or footers to explain what the sections are.

Cell Formatting

It is common for your rows to all use the same format, but you can also have different kinds of cell layout and styles on your table.

Provide Data

The first question is, how to provide data to a table view? When you want to add an iOS table view, it will need at least two things

Number of rows

The content of the cell for each row.

When configuring a table view, it expects to be explicitly connected to an object in our application that will act as its data source.